How do so many folks have so many dives

[dreamdive]

LOL!!! You are not the only one who is bewildered by some of these dive claims!

I say: unless they are logged, they are guestimates - wild ones by a lot of them.

 

[TSandM]

I live where shore diving is easy, and you can do it all winter. Add in some resort or liveaboard trips, where the dive count racks up pretty fast, and it hasn't been difficult to log more than 150 dives in a year. Add that up over 9 years, and it gets to quite a total.

 

[BDSC]

I actually don't log my dives anymore. I logged the first 500 and then just quit. I suppose I just got lazy about it or just didn't see a real benefit in doing so. I've been to Bonaire 9 or 10 times since I was certified and just how many times do I need to log a dive at Karpata or where ever. I suspect I have crossed the 1000 dive mark as I have actually picked up the pace of my diving over the past 5 years or so. I have been diving since 91 so even if I have exactly 1000 dives, that's only about 43 dives per year on average. Not really that hard to do.

On my profile I use the "I just don't log dives" as my dive count. I was told that new divers may take what a person says as gospel if they show a high dive count on SB. Some of the advice I give doesn't exactly line up with the normal advice I see given on SB.

---------- Post added September 15th, 2014 at 12:52 PM ----------

I say: unless they are logged, they are guestimates - wild ones by a lot of them.

And if a person really wanted to, they could log dives they never did. Of course I suspect most folks on SB aren't really impressed by other folks dive counts.

 

[gypsyjim]

I dived with one fellow, about whom everyone who knows him says that he has already logged one or two dives before his gear has gotten wet in the morning.....

 

[tbone1004]

the big push for me happened when I was AI for a lot of scuba classes at the university. I would run on average 100 dives/semester *4 dives/day, 8 days of diving ish per class, and typically 3 classes* just in training dives with them. Add that to a bunch of personal diving and I was pushing 250/year and that lasted 3 years. I had stopped logging those due to not having a computer that downloads them, but now that I have a Petrel it is doing the work for me, so I'll go in and put a quick note in there. The biggest thing for me is bottom hours, especially now that most of my diving is well over an hour, it's a far cry from the quick training dives for OW that are 30 ish minutes with nothing really going on for me.

I'm up over 1k dives in the 5 years I've been certified, but like I said, the first 700 ish were a lot of short shallow stuff, and while I have hundreds of hours of pool bottom time, I don't bother logging that either. The curve has slowed considerably for quantity of dives, but the duration has increased drastically and that's what matters.

 

[boulderjohn]

Diving for 20 years only requires one to average 50 dives a year to reach 1,000. That really isn't a lot for an avid diver. I live in America's heartland, far from good diving, but I am a snowbird spending a lot of time in Florida. I have averaged a bit over 100 dives a year for the last few years, which really isn't all that much for an instructor. I expect to exceed that average by a fair amount this year. Getting to 1,000 dives is not a big deal if you have been doing it long enough.

...and I make sure I log any dive I do with a student. If sometime down the road a student makes some claim that something happened on a dive, I want my record as both a recollection of what actually happened and a piece of evidence of it.

 

[FinnMom]

Two things surprise me and both go a long way to explaining dive numbers:
1) Scubaboard has surprising many people who have been diving since the 1970s, 1960s and even 1950s.
2) Many people take 2 even 3 dive trips a year (she said with thinly-disguised jealously). One week-long trip can be 25 dives.

I dive locally, on the average more than once a week. It seems silly, but a 1-week trip will account for more than 1/4 of all my yearly dives. Most of my dives are about an hour so time vs dives is irrelevant. I don't count dives made with students, ehich are of course shorter.

Back in the day, when a "dive trip" meant driving 1-2 hrs. somewhere, the club's word of wisdom was more than 100 dives/yr and still married was not possible.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

I only know two divers whom I believe have 5,000 dives. Both are still very active divers and began in 1960-1961. I know a few others who claim to have 5,000 dives. Anyone with less than 40 years diving experience claiming to have 5,000 dives makes my eyebrows raise. I've been scuba diving for 25 years. I live about two miles from the ocean and have a boat. I'm lucky if I get 125 dives in a year. I've never counted class dives nor pool sessions, so I feel honest when someone asks me how many dives I have. I will reach 2,000 sometime next year.

 

[jimbeeler]

.... I suspect most folks on SB aren't really impressed by other folks dive counts.

I am very impressed with the knowledge of some SB members. It's not difficult to figure out who are "the real deal".

As I told one person on a dive boat last week (while listening to another diver brag), if you have to tell everyone how great a diver you are.... you probably aren't.

Jim

 

[mrdre]

I'm not sure which agency you instruct for but when I did my instructor class, I was taught, do a dive with a student; log it. If I have 2 separate classes going on, log EVERY dive. Whether I want to count it as a "real" dive is my business but it is still logged as a dive. Which agency allows you the latitude to not log a training dive with students, and I'm not speaking of pool time.

Mmm... perhaps.. any agency? Why would an agency require instructors to log their dives? They'd require the instructor to teach the student how to log, but then it's up to the diver whether to log the dives or not.